Becoming Jane... Becoming me

Two years ago I sat in a hotel room in Philadelphia reminiscing about the last 5 months I spent working as a ski instructor, traveling to New Zealand, camping and hiking remote places, and cultivating a friendship with a man thousands of miles away. With time to kill before school started, I rented "Becoming Jane." And somehow, despite a turbulent year filled with enough discouragement and setbacks to last me many more to come, I still found myself romantically cheering for the two main characters and simultaneously hoping that someday I could have a fantastic love story of my own. Not even the trials of the hardest year of my life could shake free my desire for love and a glimmering hope that I could find happiness. My desire for love, my love of love transcended it all. A desire so steadfast, so unshaken that the idea of unfulfilled love seemed the most horrible thing in the world. As I sat on the pull out bed of the hotel room watching young Jane Austen fall in love with a brilliant but poor man, I believed at every turn that they would end up together, somehow. It was just meant to be, love like that, they had to be together. I never doubted the ending; I never imagined they would become estranged lovers living separate lives, their love a distant memory but a contiguous emotion. My disbelief, coupled with alcohol provided by an old friend who I visited later that night, even led me to call up the most recent but incredibly distant object of my affection.
As we spoke, about trivial things at first I am sure, I said "you know what the saddest thing is?"
"What?" he said.
"When two people love each other and can't be together. That is just the saddest thing in the world."
I'm not sure what he said immediately after, but I will always remember his words in that conversation: "Well I think it's obvious how we feel about each other" Being me, and a little drunk, I replied, "Well I know how I feel about you, but I don't know how you feel about me."
Needless to say, I found out that night that a wonderful man on the other side of the world felt affectionately towards me. Over the next year these conversations, flirting, laughing, the occasional crying (on my part) occurred over the shoddy internet of my basement dorm room. By summer we stopped talking, I finally had some space to emotionally move on with my life, and I even forgot him for weeks or months on end over the next year.
Now, two years later, I sit in my bed after re-watching "Becoming Jane." Somehow, this time, the whole thing seemed different. I found myself wondering at times if young Jane Austen should marry the rich man for whom she has no affection. I find myself less impressed, though still wholly enraptured, by James McAvoy's character. After all, he was slightly careless, he did have a family to support, and he shouldn't just run away for love. Am I more cynical now? Am I wiser? Or is this just a part of the jadedness that society feeds you in the form of images of a perfect life, a life of financial security in an economic downturn that seems to be fraying relationships at the edges nowadays? Or am I just less naive?
I still think of the man in New Zealand. I talk to him fairly often this summer, in fact. But now the terms are no flirting or insinuation of feelings or attraction. Just a relationship built on the theoretical and moral discussions of two intelligent people. And I like it that way. It is stimulating, something to look forward to, but it is not something on which to hinge the balance of my hopes or happiness. And so things have changed. A year has gone by, emotions have leveled - much more than they have been in the past -, and I seem to have a different outlook on things. Not sure what that outlook is, not sure that I'm ever sure until I look back and find my perceptions illuminated only by the fact that they have shifted into another indiscernable form. But such is life. As long as I still cry for the love lost, or the pain of love unfulfilled due to the hope that love can indeed be fulfilled, I think I will be fine.